12 Wednesday Jun 2013
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Mental Health Monday: Coping, Helping, Hoping, Remembering, and Using Your Mommy Voice was kind enough to list “In Which Our Heroine Uses Her Mommy Voice” with an excellent selection of other articles on mental illness. I recommend that ye go and enjoy!
09 Sunday Jun 2013
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family, imaginary friends, imagination, introvert, overcrowded, solitude, sprained ankle, writing
Like I suspect most people who end up writing fiction, I have what one might call (if one pins me to the wall and makes accusing eye contact) imaginary friends. This was long the Secret of My Soul, until I hit 50 and decided that a lot of stuff doesn’t really matter. I mentioned this casually at a lawn party to a delightful woman who then boldfaced shared that she wasn’t alone with her cats either, if one might put it that way. This made my summer. I wasn’t alone anymore.
I don’t make them extra cups of tea (although for a split second in a supermarket back when I was really sick I wondered if the roast were big enough) but it’s handy to have somebody to talk to (to think to?) who has the inside track and can call me on my sheep when said sheep hit the fan. Moreover, when my pals overlap with my fictional characters, I find that I can give them extra depth because I, you know, know them. (This doesn’t always happen. I’m not sure why not.)
But this essay isn’t so much about my imaginary life (the life I imagine), as it is about my imaginary life (the faculty within that births such imaginations). For the first, it centers around “I’d rather not be alone;” for the second, it’s more “Leave me the sheep alone NOW because I can’t think, thank you very much.” That is, I need to be alone with my thoughts.
I share a tiny apartment with two ferrets, two cats, two other adults, and the various toys, books, and art supplies pertaining thereto. The neighbors are . . . um . . . boisterous. Things were at a bearable status quo when my daughter, who describes herself as “surly,” hid in her room all day playing World of Warcraft on Skype with her boyfriend, but then my son moved in. It turns out that he plays World of Warcraft on Skype with his buddies. I play World of Warcraft all by myself, thank you. (OK, I’m in a guild, but all that’s probably another post for another day.)
My son is living in the living room pending our moving to a three-bedroom apartment. I hang out in the living room because I have this sort of ghetto desk out here consisting of an artist’s drawing board propped on a TV tray, because my desk (which takes up I-am-not-kidding half my miniscule bedroom) is covered with jewelry making cruft. My son and I get along very well (he isn’t surly), but when he’s not Skyping with several people at once, he shares his random thoughts with me. He has a lot of random thoughts, because I gave him the genetic gift of ADHD.
Moreover, things at work have conspired to keep me in the center and out of my office, and I’m um, stressed. I need to be alone with my thoughts, and have acquired an inner surliness of my own. My imaginary friends are cowering somewhere beneath my corpus callosum. I can get a little inner peace by working on my artwork, but my own ADHD yips when it’s more than an hour and a half of that.
However: I have a nasty sprained ankle, gotten while tripping over a bag of old clothes and other detritus that I (in an attack of pre-moving virtue) was actually chucking. And I have found that I’m lucky not to be alone.
Several years ago, I had this idea (which I only wish I could blame on an attack of mania) that fat me could perform high-impact activities like jogging and club-style dancing. I micro-tore my Achilles tendon, which I ignored until I had a lump the size of a prune–and an orthopod who ‘splained that enough was enough, and my butt was going to be on the sheeping couch for six weeks, with crutches to be used to so much as go to the bathroom. I surfed up a terrifying blog on the surgery, with pictures (not linking you because it traumatized me, and I like autopsy shows) and decided to play against character and behave myself.
I lived alone at the time. I watched all of Buffy and all of Angel on Netflix, knit myself a giant knee sock to go under the nasty chafing boot, wrote a lot, and whimpered when I made myself tea, let alone had to go to the grocery store. It sucked.
But this time here I am, with the son making me the tea and the daughter cooking without much fuss. Even the kitten curls up with me at night. And it’s pretty swell. So I’m writing this with Pandora on my headphones cranked up to a suitably isolating level, and I can at least talk to you. Stress happens, and I’m lucky to be having it in a family that loves me and shakes me away from being alone with my thoughts, which all in all is good for me.
Sometimes.
06 Thursday Jun 2013
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I run a Recovery Learning Center for people with mental illness, being in strong recovery from bipolar disorder myself. I got hit on by a full-fledged Dirty Old Man today at work. Complete with chair walker. Mr. Smith has earlier refused to come visit our center (unless I myself am there, which is only part of the time, needing to run about and do director stuff and whatnot). He has also claimed to “be in trouble there” but hasn’t satisfied my curiosity. (I have only been there for five months.) But today he wheeled himself in and was fairly personable. He inquired as to whether I was married? Engaged? Going steady? “No,” I told him, and then with all the iron I could draw, “I prefer it this way.” He desisted.
But then another staffer took the other peers for a walk, leaving me manning the fort. In comes Mr. Smith, asking if he can talk to me. Now, being Talked To is part of my job, seeing as peers either confuse me with a Mental Health Professional (that’s what we call them) or, as do random people in the street, realize that I’m a nice lady who’s a good listener. So I told Mr. Smith that he might do so.
“Can I close the door?”
Uh-oh. But we were in a pretty big room, and I knew I could take him without trying hard, even if he used the walker as a shield.
“Su-uu-re.”
He advanced (sans walker) up to the desk, and I realized my strategic mistake: I was sitting in the reception cubie, and what with the poorly-functioning copier taking up half the space, Mr. Smith now had me barricaded, meaning that at worst I would have to hurt him. (I am a well-muscled fat woman with a stock of normally well-behaved rage issues to use as rocket fuel as needed.)
He re-established that I was single; I re-established that the single state is what I live and breathe for; and then he reached out and patted my elbow. Mr. Smith is missing a fair number of teeth and it was as well that I couldn’t make out what he was saying at the moment.
“DON’T TOUCH. Back away, Mr. Smith.” (I also have a superlative Mommy voice, essential for anybody cursed with looking like a nice lady.) To my relief and some surprise, he did so, mousing off quite nicely.
I explained in Mommy voice that We Don’t Do Things Like That At The Center Because It’s Disrespectful. And besides, Women Don’t Like It. He was abashed, opened the door, and begged me not to tell anybody. (Guess nobody wants to be shot down, even if they always bring an emergency seat to catch themselves.)
I’ve been patted at by naughty old men since I was a then-terrified child and by now I have their number. (It undoubtedly helps that I can make them into cracker crumbs these days.) So I was a little amused and kept on puttering at my email (keeping an eye on him the while). Then something occurred to me.
“Mr. Smith, did you ever offer your interest to Jane?” Now Jane is my predecessor; I am told that being assaulted in her office was a large part of why she left.
Why yes, Mr. Smith admitted. He had asked her for a kiss, and as she had bent down to do it, his hand had brushed her breast. By accident. (Of course.)
Ah. This explained why Mr. Smith “was in trouble at the Center.” It also explained why one of the reasons I was hired was because of my “strong personality.”
I’ve never talked to Jane about this (“Hey J, who grabbed your boob, anyway?” Awkward much?) but had frankly ascribed it to one of the people my superiors say I must describe as “peers who have paid their debt to society and are in the recovery process,” who also wander about our large Department of Mental Health building. (The unenlightened campus cops regrettably refer to them as “Level 3 sex offenders.”) Now, let me be crystal clear about this: I understand triggering and personal boundary limits. Some of mine are just plain random. So I’m not mocking Jane. At all. I mean, yuck.
But for my own sake, I’m just as glad that it was most probably Mr. Smith.
31 Friday May 2013
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One of my adventures involved being homeless for a while. Like so many other people, I got sick, lost my job, had no other resources, and we got evicted. For a period of some weeks, I stashed my daughter with a friend, while I . . . hit the bricks. This wasn’t some fancy-schmancy “Harvard and Homeless” thing where I could go home anytime I wanted to–it was the real thing. Most of it–seven months of it–we spent in a family congregate shelter which was as nice as such a place could be, but for about a month I was waiting for a bed. Always got one, thank God.
I was so naive I can’t believe it now–a product of my class, really–and when I was released from the hospital, I couldn’t believe they would just turn me out into the street. But lo and behold–there I was, shivering with cold and yuppie culture-shock. I had a blank book with me, and so I did what I do: I wrote about it. Not as much as I wish I had, but I chronicled a few hours, at least. Here it is:
February, 2008
It’s 3:50 p and Tyra Banks is on TV in the back of the Multiservice Center between Brookline and Green in Cambridge. I am waiting for the shuttle to St. Pat. These are 12 of us all told–which is good, I think, as there are reportably only 15 beds, But as some beds are supposedly long-term, I’m unsure.
As with other Cantabrigian poverty sites, this is split pretty evenly between races–5 white, 6 black, and me making up the difference.
Most of the women are “obvious”–in other words, if you saw them on the T, you’d know their plight. All of us have Stuff, ranging from the stereotypical black garbage bags to rucksacks and backpacks.
I have a backpack and the brown paper bag which announces my recent hospitalization.
Like me, most of the others appear to be mentally ill in some way or another.
The TV, now on Law and Order, shows the usual depressing commercials: “6 out of 10 Americans are now in debt!” And a new one, which brashly accuses, “If you don’t have a job, you shouldn’t be watching TV.” These ads are in fact at least slightly counterproductive: They are why I tend to avoid daytime television–and I can’t be the only one.
The woman next to me is asleep, her head hanging down to her chest, her mouth hanging open. One scarred and swollen hand tells the story: She’s probably nodding from a recent fix.
Another woman superficially appears very different: white, groomed, wearing generically preppy sweater, collared shirt, earrings, and hair pulled back under a narrow band. However, when I came in, she was busily sorting through thick piles of what looked like cash machine and other receipts, rocking slightly and muttering.
Quarter past. A slender, harried looking woman comes in and surveys the scene. She counts us and has the count affirmed. She zeroes in on the newbies and asks our names.
A man pokes his head in and asks if there is to be a lottery. I’m guessing he takes the losers to the big shelter in Boston on Albany Street. But our beds are safe today. We gather our stuff and move outside. The driver announces that those with wheeled bags will have to walk. She means a 60-ish woman who has a heavy wheeled suitcase among her traps. The old lady has been peering at all of us suspiciously from beneath her birds-nesty hat. Her purse is guarded by a large jingle bell: One wonders if modern pickpockets have been trained by 21st century Fagins to render such defenses useless.
As the white van slides through Cambridge, it ironically goes past my starting point at the hospital. A long hike for the old lady, I think, and indeed I don’t see her arrive later, though it’s not as if I were guarding the door.
There are eleven of us in the van, which is not unpleasantly scented with a Yankee Candle hangtag. “Baby Love” is on the oldies station and a couple of the women sing bits along. I hum a little under my breath. We pull up behind the Catholic Charities building I’ve passed so many times in the happily-unknowing past. We disembark and rescue our bags from the crowded space behind the back seat.
Another woman is looking as awkward as I am. We hang back, waiting to perhaps be invited or instructed, but after a moment, we follow the stream of old-timers into the house. We are greeted by a solid woman in tidily tucked-back dreadlocks, who exudes an air or warmth and command. She asks our names, and introduces herself as Michelle, case manager responsible for the Transitional program, which I learn later is a stable bed program for women with jobs.
The other newbie and I slide into the cozy living room–couch, chairs–TV–as much to get out of the way as anything else, and sit for a moment. We introduce ourselves. Happily for my atrociously porous memory, she has the same name as a favorite (if long-distant) relative. We are soon shooed out into the dining area. Cheerful kitchen curtains, lavender walls.
Six tables are in this room; five inlaid with green tile in white pine and the sixth butcherblock. The chairs are assorted. Another TV is perched on one beneath the windows; the ubiquitous spinet piano is on the opposite wall.
There are already other women here. Thursday is the only night one can come directly to the shelter, in order to attend a weekly residents’ meeting. Cousin and I sit at one of the green patterned tables awaiting the next step.
The other women swirl and bustle around us, clearly completely at home. The news is on the TV; the bad reception shows an unusually friendly moose ambling up to delighted motorists. We learn the youngster’s lack of fear probably means he has a fatal brain worm, and cries of dismay ring out from several. I’m silent, but feel just as sad. I later realize that at least for me the feeling stems in part from kinship: Both the moose and I are banking on a deus ex machina; by conventional wisdom, neither of us has a hope in hell.
Cousin and I are called into the big room in front which old-fashionedly combines office and kitchen. We’re given packets of paperwork to fill out: vital statistics, why we became homeless, where we spent last night. Where did we spend the majority of nights last week? Month? Year? Who referred us? Which of several single and multiracial options do we choose? (White/Black/Indian is never listed; even in these enlightened days, I’m an “other.”)
Have we ever been incarcerated? A yes from Cousin; apparently the name of her origin which I hadn’t recognized was a prison. Involved with the Department of Youth Services? And so on. I am unsurprised to see on the last page a request to disclose basic stats to funder CDBG.
****
At that point, they served dinner–I remember basic American food, and enough of it. You could get seconds. Then everybody lined up and was given linen–sheets and blankets and pillowcase. I also got a big T-shirt for a nightie which depicted Somerville’s annual Cleanup/City Pride Day from the year before. The people explaining what was to be done with what were brusque. I almost cried, but I was too numb.
I was put into the smaller room, with only four beds. I slept listening to “Mama” in the next bed. The classic bag lady, she would go through all of her stuff, the soft rustle of the bags almost soothing.
The next morning we were awakened at 6 and fed breakfast, and everybody left to go be homeless people on the street. I made the mistake of seeing somebody still in the bathroom and taking my time until 7:10. I was leapt upon by this horrible woman who screamed the information that the other girl had a job and was allowed to stay later, and that if I ever did that again, I would never come back. I sobbed and begged in terror. Another employee ran out and calmed me down–apparently this other woman just had a random streak of bitch.
It was a random streak, because she stuck up for me a couple of weeks later when a roommate kept awakening me for snoring. (At my peak weight I snored like an apneac hippo.) This was made worse by a horrible lingering messy cold. That same roommate got offended when I stopped letting her use my laptop to check her email–I think it’s a sort of code that one hands out random cruelties to one’s mates and expects automatic shares in any spoils–a sort of tribal culture, I guess.
Anyway, some other time I might share an entry or two I made at the kinder and gentler homeless shelter, where we had a room that was ours. But on this summer evening, with both my now-grown kids playing video games, and me being allowed to loll in bed with my badly sprained ankle instead of being dragged up for chores–this is an evening for home.
29 Wednesday May 2013
Posted in Blog
My 22-year-old son moves in with me tonight. As I write, he is boarding in Cincinnati and will show up at Logan in about two and a half hours. I hope. My son is a lot like me; he has adventures, and with the whole state of Ohio to have them in–whoa nelly! Anything could be happening, and since “phone” is still an exotic concept of which we speak, there’s nothing I can do but wait.
As always, there are complicating factors–maybe it will thunder, maybe it won’t, and maybe Logan will get a wild hare up its ass and throw down some dramatic security measures for Mrs. Obama, here today to talk to the Marathon Bombing survivors. But as of now Delta assures me things are A-OK, and I refuse to hear any threatening music in the background. Instead, I wait here at the office until it’s a reasonable time to go wait at the airport.
I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been waiting for eleven years. After a court battle, custody of my two children was split between the parents, and through an unusual combination of power, spite, and the judge’s overlooking the concept “visitation order,” I’ve seen my son four times in the last decade. I can never forget burying my face in his curls that one last time before getting behind the wheel to take his silent and gray-faced older sister back to what used to home, and would be spun into a two-person home again, but for a while was just the place where we lived with an empty room.
That was eleven years ago, and after adventures, my daughter and I now have a happy (if too-tiny) home which we share with a cat and two ferrets. The adjustments will now have to go the other way: buying more food and toilet paper rather than less, having to house him on the couch instead of letting odds and ends fill a room without an occupant. No more slouching around our bachelorette pad semi-clad. Our family is bigger now, with all the excitement and stress that entails.
My own adjustment has to go the other way too. In order to keep it together at least for a few months, I sat as hard on all that horrible ugly pain as I could. I’ve survived many nightmares, but this was the worst. I couldn’t dissociate away from it, and nothing helped–nothing except focusing on my daughter, who was dealing with her own trauma over a judge who hadn’t believed her and had taken her little brother away. Shutting myself down was all I had, and it wasn’t healthy.
I have to open the cupboard, now that it’s safe, now that it’s over. As I write this, my Pandora is playing the title music from Star Wars–which seems only appropriate. I’m one of those annoying people whom John Candy apostrophized at the end of Planes, Trains and Automobiles: “What? Was your mother a key grip?”–I have to sit through all the titles or It Doesn’t Count. The resolving chord, that weird little MPAA symbol. (My tribe has no apologies now that movies have occasionally started rewarding us with extra scenes as Easter eggs. Bwah ha, oh daughter pacing in the lobby!)
I waited. Am waiting. They’re running the list of post-post-production assistants, and my son’s plane has left Ohio (with him on it oh please) and is in fact running twenty minutes early. Tomorrow I will have the nuisance of tiptoeing through a morning routine that doesn’t involve lolling on the couch, and in the days after that, so many little annoyances involved in getting my country mouse installed in the Big City. Many annoyances. Sibling opera. Crowded house. Can’t wait.
26 Sunday May 2013
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Plinky prompt: Tell us about something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail (and tell us why you haven’t tried it yet).
Well, that could be a long list: Go on craigslist and get a kitten. (Due to two weird experiences with craigslist I am now phobic of it.) Join my friend Jacques' writing groups and make some contacts. (Am (a) spacy and (b) shy.) Get back into life drawing. (Severe shortage of people willing to sit still for long periods without being paid). And so on.
But let's go for the pertinent, the looming: I need to clean my room.
I have several room-cleaning issues piled on top of each other. My room is very small and what furniture I have is very big. You have to move the desk chair around in the aisle to pass, and let's hope you're not really fat if things catch on fire, because the angle between the desk and the nightstand to get to the fire door is a bit on the narrow. (And please don't knock stuff off my desk with your butt as you pass.)
And oh yeah, the stuff on the desk: I make jewelry. Not very complex; it's not like I have a bench or even an anvil. Just a bunch of beads, findings, Lego, stretchy string, polymer clay, gold leaf, empty vials of beads, torn packets, a box of Asian newspaper pencils I got in my stocking, two or three broken or old pairs of reading glasses in the wrong prescription, watch parts, sorting bins, empty water glasses, my mouse, a hand-pieced & quilted coaster rescued from a project not meant to be, tiny ziploc bags of the sort used for illicit drugs, a wafer cookie tin filled with polyhedral dice, my keyboard tucked to one side on top of a cookie tine now holding more Lego and the like, a paper clip holder, loose earrings without mates, scissors . . . we are now squarely at the obvious issue as to why I haven't tried it yet, which is that I have less organizing skill than the average small animal who steals random things.
I wanted–want–a Zen desk, but that little cardboard box with the teeny rake and the sand and the pebbles got knocked off the back.
The closet is piled with clothing I have worn, might wear, and might wear again if I can Do Something To Fix It. Very little of this is the canonical five-more-pounds, as I have recently lost ten and am thus faced with but-it-was-pretty/pricey/I might gain it back and then what?
My nightstand is filled with everything I could possibly need from getting into bed until waking (except the wand that pees for me, which is lost). My stuffed animals take up half the bed–and we're not discussing under the bed, because we had a surprise inspection six months ago by some agency installing some sort of little white plastic thing that does nothing, and it all had to be very quickly hidden.
And no, I don't have bugs or anything. Just . . . stuff. Lots of . . . stuff.
Worst of all, I have to move soon, and as always I am determined to somehow have a room like my exceedingly organized daughter, with many charming little tchotchkes and everything in the places she designates as if it's *easy*, damn it. And it's never going to happen. But . . . what if it could? As a guaranteed success?
And there's the rub: That room could exist; but I'm not the non-ADHD person who lives in it. I do too many things at once. In the process of writing this essay, I have washed out two shirts (nuking the mysterious carbon stain on the linen vest YES Mr. Billy Mays!), made 17 polymer clay beads with the gold leaf, hennaed my hair, eaten two small meals, watched 5 episodes of The Vicar of Dibley and gotten most of the beading stuff into the very nice organizer thing I got for it last month. Traces of this day are spread throughout my house.
But it's only been four hours. Daylight remains. I will rinse out my hair, scrub the henna out of the measuring cup, make the bracelet with the beads, and (I think) throw out at least three bags of junk. I have to now. It's in print.
25 Saturday May 2013
Posted in Blog
I was once adopted by a stray kitten whom we named Mathom (which as many Tolkien fans knows means “one of those objects you just can’t throw away and pass around,” and as far fewer Old English students know means “treasure”). He was patient, gentle, and brilliant even for a cat, with a large command of understood English; the kind of cat one can talk to. He would listen, and he understood the logical progression of things: One evening, he lounged nearby while we completed a jigsaw puzzle. He watched us admire it–and then his eyes bugged when we began to take it apart once again. We had clearly fallen off the interspecies ledge of mutual understanding–we had taken so much time on it! Had refused his help so politely! I have never seen that expression on a cat’s face again–not even on the Interwebs.
Mathom hated the vet. Far beyond the average vet-hating of hiding and swearing and an occasional irritable swat. He would turn into twelve pounds of tabby predator, snarling and screaming and lashing out at demon speed. It took at least two people (one of them me) to pin him down long enough to give him his shots; one vet announced that he was clearly quite healthy and no exam would be needed! And the head of UW’s vet department looked very, very concerned as he washed off his wounds while looking at my load of two-week-late Annie.
“I’d keep the cat away from the baby. Just to be on the safe side.”
We followed his advice and shut him out of the nursery the first night we brought our daughter home from the hospital. Just in case.
Well, Annie coughed. Or something. Not even a fuss. But I had brand-new-mommy-ears, and off I went. OK, that sounds speedier than it was, considering I was clutching my cesarian staples as I lunged out of bed. The nursery was next door, and I was there easily within twenty seconds at most–
–and there was Mathom, pawing at the door and yowing that I had better get my sorry ass over there and see what was amiss with HIS BABY. We didn’t bother shutting him out after that.
But Annie wasn’t The Vet.
At long last (too long, really), after too many visits of them taking out the Dangerous Feral Cat Equipment (carpeting, gloves, and the stick with the gizmo that traps their heads) we all decided to just shoot him full of la-la while he was still in the carrier and come back the next day. Wayne, the vet who came up with this, even cut us a deal on the overnight–it was the best solution for everybody. (And it gave him bragging rights on what a nice bellyrub our jaguar allowed him in the morning.)
Somewhere along the years I found out that there was a word for this: Triggered. It was just that when Mathom went to the vet, he fought for his life–because when Mathom was at the vet, that was where he fought for his life, vets being the places where fighting for your life tended to happen. And so forth. He was triggered. He was already four or five months old when he found me–and intact–so God knows what vet experience had done it. Then again, I suppose being put into a box and taken out by strangers in scary smells and having a cold glass rod shoved up your butt isn’t a primo day for most of us, so maybe it was just business as usual that he was voting against.
Psychology is a horrible, desentientizing thing, to turn such a noble soul into a frantic killer, at the mercy of a fear that not even I could save him from. The vet trying to kill him was in his head, out of claw and hiss range. Nothing to be done.
What made me think of Mathom was that I’m about to move. I have all reasonable ducks in a row–no real shortage of apartments in our comfortably large area, a sufficient chunk of the ready saved up for the exorbitant expense, a now 24-year-old Annie willing to do the anxiety-provoking things of looking and calling and making arrangements–but I’m terrified. I have a huge life change happening right before then (baby #2, now 22, is coming to live with us) and it’s dwarfed by The Move. Because I’m triggered.
Moves have been places where I’ve fought for my life, albeit behind a cheerful nervous smile and hidden tears. Horrible screaming matches. Not being packed. Friends coming and going grim-faced through teetering walls of one’s crap as if plunging through jungle in 100° heat. Annie needing stitches in her eyebrow when crashing her tricycle onto the ramp of the truck. The humiliation of piles of debris that really, really, really should have been dealt with before other people had to catch you in the midst. The truck being too tall for the overhang. Rain. The inevitable mountain by the trash of didn’t-really-need-it, no-room-for-it–but DAMN IT still my STUFF!!! (Although I will always cling to the snapshot of pulling away from the curb as a happy man stood strumming our second-best guitar, already gone to a new home.)
None of these moves were presided upon by the sheriff, but a couple of them only beat him there by a couple of days–those occurred when I was at my most ill and thus most vulnerable, and so those triggers are the deepest of all. It doesn’t help that my best friend is moving too, and is in the midst of her own eddy of uncertainty about what and who goes where when. As I write this, I can barely look at my own possessions without wondering if I will ever find them after we pack and unpack, or wondering which bits will end up on that pile by the dumpster, of being afraid I’ll cry.
But I make myself remember the last move, when I visualized already being moved into my perfect apartment. (Not this one. Trust me.) And . . . my life was still my life, for good or ill. And that’s how it turned out. Unpacking happens, and there are worse things than driving home with somebody who got a good bellyrub and a clean bill of health and is sharing a loud still-drunken purr.
Got any for me, Dr. Wayne?
21 Tuesday May 2013
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No fat pigs purchased, though.
It’s been 16 months. I am embarrassed; I feel I owe the two or three of you who were reading me an explanation. But I have none. Somewhere in the beginning of last year I became unplugged from Nova Terra. I’ve missed it; I’ve missed the tiny piece of my identity that said blogger, which snuggled up to writer. Where did it go?
Every time it would slink through my brain that I had this blog thing to do, I would wring my mental hands in panic, exclaiming that I had nothing to say! No, nothing! I knew that I could well enough foam out of the corners of my mouth about the on-going clusterfuck that was the Earth-grazing meteorite named Mitt Romney–but I was doing enough stress about all that. (So much stress that I spent Election Day in bed trying not to vomit. I didn’t realize until a recurrence several days later that I’d merely been reacting to an new medicine I was trying–I used to get sick over excitement all the time as a kid.) This election threatened to make dramatic changes to my life–I’m on disability–and I don’t even want to feel that powerless, that terrified ever again. So writing about that would have salted the wound–and I am sure sooner or later I would have moaned over its pretentiousness and redacted it.
(Think about it: Isn’t a good thing that Facebook keeps scrolling our momentary faux pas into the past where we don’t have to see them with more dispassionate eyes?)
But on looking into my documents folder, I see that the big thing sucking down my writing energy was trying–and failing–to make something real, something an agent would like to see, out of Monsters. I’d started writing this book back in 2005 and then when my life fell apart in various dramatic ways, I’d just kept writing the damn thing. And writing, and writing, and then when the story was finally finished in all its badness, I had 300,000 words. I was shocked. So I split it into a trilogy. All I could do, really, not being an established writer who can get away with that sort of overkill.
The problem with the first book of a trilogy–well, mine at least–is that unless you have Peter Jackson and New Zealand to distract today’s audience, you only have a third of a plot. And the first third, yet. I sat down and said, “So much for that.” At some point I’m going to take it apart–there’s a lot to take apart, as one of its flaws was that the structure was too complex–and see what just one of them looks like. I majored in watercolor, and every so often my professor would mosey behind me and tell me I had too many paintings going on in my painting. It was sort of like that.
I just had all this STUFF exploding out of me! Characters and backstories and biology and history and culture and . . . it was fun, but it wasn’t a novel, and that was the job I decided I wanted to do. So I iced it, and went on to Book #2. That one also started being too many books at once, so I took the advice of my ever-patient editor (he’s a beta tester software engineer, proving that skills transfer) and knocked it back to a single one. It’s a decent length right now, and we’ll see where we are by the end of the summer. As I get better at writing, and he gets better at editing, we ask more of what I pull out of my head and fingers. (And yeah, sometimes other body parts too. It’s science fiction. Give me a break.)
But it occurs that the more one writes, the better one gets, at least a little bit, so I’ll start trying to keep Nova Terra up to date. I might tuck in a longish story here and there; might have some painful recollections. It might devolve to crappy journaling and whinging upon occasion, but whacks to the head with the dead fish are acceptable, and I suppose practicing my writing is better for me than doing the 3 am squirrel o’ obsession thing.
At least from my point of view. Welcome back!
27 Friday Jan 2012
Posted in Blog
When I was small, my parents both worked in New York City–my father was an early systems analyst, and my mother was a proofreader. To tell the truth, my mother wasn't cut out for the job of full-time mommy, so they made a radical decision for the mid-60s, and shipped me upstate to my grandmother, who lived in Walden, NY.
Her house was on Main Street, which really was a Main Street–a long hill with our neighbor the Presbyterian church at the top and the bank at the bottom. Along the way was the Woolworth's, which was still a 5 & 10 cent store. The local beauty parlor was at the foot of the hill around the corner from the bank, and so my Gaga and I made the trip about once a week. I would run or skip ahead of her as fast as I could down the hill, and turn around at the telephone pole at the bottom, to wait for her more stately progress with her cane.
Walden was like most little upstate towns: almost all white; and I am not. So it wasn't too surprising that one afternoon this outing turned sour. A bunch of older kids started to follow me down the hill. (I was three or four; they were about eight.) I could hear their whispering and giggles; I could feel their hostility burning through my back. I was terrified.
But I instinctively refused to give them the satisfaction of my panic. I didn't look behind me, but continued down to the telephone pole, my heart hammering. There, I turned around as usual and faced them–with my eyes shut–to wait for some piece of future that was a blank grey of anticipated horror. But I was stoic Tiger Lily. No blood in the water for those nasty little sharks.
Then there came a wonderful screaming. My 75-year-old Gaga came thundering down the hill, brandishing her cane. I wanted that cane to break their bones; they sensed doom too, and slunk off. She gathered me up and I began to cry hysterically. It took a long time for me to be brave enough to leave Gaga's side when we went downtown after that.
But when I was alone in what to me was a huge backyard, it was heaven: Rosebushes and beds of tulip and hyacinth; my tricycle and the jungle gym my dad put up for me. (My favorite part was the post-hole digger and pouring the magical cement.)
And when it snowed, it covered the quiet streets as snow should always do; I would look out at it through the dusty-smelling lace curtains and watch the whiteness turning everything into a something else from a tale of wonder. And when bundled into the inevitable snowsuit and boots, even with less movement than an astronaut, the snow came over my knees. It didn't do that again until I moved to Wisconsin as an adult; I spent the rest of my childhood thinking about Walden as a Golden Age.
Fifteen or sixteen years later, I was on a trip with some friends, and we passed the sign on the New York Thruway. So I coaxed, and there we went. Main Street was, of course, easy to find. The bank was still there, and so was the church. (I think Woolworth's might have been gone.) And there was my grandmother's house.
It was a big staggering eyesore, with clapboards held together with chunks of peeling paint–just another rental house in just another small town in upstate New York. And when I went around back to the backyard, I was stunned at how tiny it was. I was in tears; partly from missing my Gaga, and partly from how shoddy the reality behind the magic was.
Thirty years later, heaven alone knows what it's like–and I refuse to Google to find out. Maybe it's gone the way of the kids around the telephone pole. But I prefer to think that the snow still makes a Christmas card that a toddler can take for granted, because that's what a small safe world is. That's what we need our small towns to be, peeling paint notwithstanding.
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Blog
“I would never go to Walmart!” I don’t recall what I said that evoked this remark. It was at the church coffee table, and I think I brought the W-word up in some casual, iconic sense. But I clearly offended her yuppie sensibilities. It was almost as bad as if it had been the F-word. (Note to loyal readers: I only use “sheep” in print.)
What I wanted to snap in return was, “That’s because you can afford not to.”
For a while I lived in a town with a Main Street, USA, and let me tell ya, those small businesses are pricey. You’re not paying “just a little more” (and who gets to tell you and your budget what “a little” means?) for “better service,” you’re paying at least ten percent more with every chance of the shopkeeper being surly. OK, this was New England and I’m not white. Always got to have that as a possible factor, that being a primary annoyance of the non-whiteness deal. But still.
I’m not talking about the niche stores–comics, hobbies–I’m thinking of the main things, like clothing and food and what I think of as “drugstore stuff” like toilet paper. Necessities. You can’t get on without them, and more and more these days, they’re harder to come by on what America has in its 99% pockets. Every time you go to Walmart and buy some jeans and Turtle Wax and the economy-size jumbo pack, with some toys for the kids, you save at least $10-20. That’s real money to me.
My Walmart is such a long bus ride away that the driver stops in the middle and collects an extra fare. So the richest people in America get none of my money. Who does?
Walgreens. Macy*s. Best Buy. Shaw’s. I used to get toys at K-B and clothes at Lane Bryant, but they’re gone around here. And for all that miscellaneous stuff like shower curtains and lamps, there’s Target (which is merely an inconvenient dogleg of a ride from here). Note the shocking lack of small business names. There are some smallish ones: Boomerangs (an upscale dead-cheap Goodwill’s benefiting AIDS Action), MacKinnons (a butcher store where even the poor can eat high-quality meat)–but in both cases, money is a factor.
I mourn some small business types bitterly: Remember the local hardware store, filled with bins of loose nails and weird widgets that stirred a sense of longing creativity? The most important resource these stores had was the old guy in the back who knew everything. Ace does a decent job, but the dusty dimly-lit romance is gone, and although our local one has old guys, they don’t have walrus mustaches and dirty hands, and are thence less trustworthy.
But the market is what the market is. Unlike most of you, I actually know a blacksmith, who is the son of some friends. I don’t know if he shoes horses per se (he’s an artist), but he has those rare skills. There are still blacksmiths, because there are still horses who at last check still had feet–but horses are a luxury item now, and you don’t have a smithy in every small town. But we don’t think of the blacksmiths as having been run out of business by Ford, we think of it as history, if not progress. (Don’t get me started on how idyllic the pre-industrial age was, or you’ll know a lot more about really yucky things than you’d like right before dinner.)
Before the current cycle of robber barons (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose), the free market system benefited the poor. You made money by offering the best goods at the lowest prices, and if Joe down the street was doing a better job, you were tanked just as surely as if Joe was a multi-millionaire corporation. Now I know that Joe had hard work and ingenuity, instead of the biggest bankroll in the industry, but Jane Customer went home with the same change in her purse either way.
So don’t just mumble something liberal about Walmart, do something to change its abuses. If you’re a mumbler, you already know to think globally and act locally: Actively vote, volunteer, and organize. Support the unions, which despite their own problems are the last fence against employee abuse. Demand fair trade on a national and political level, and the enforcement of human rights issues against countries with sweatshops. (Thereby increasing the poverty and misery of their inhabitants, who otherwise don’t have jobs at all, but you can’t have it all; I mean that without sarcasm.)
The people who need their $20 in Walmart and who work the two jobs can’t do that as effectively as you can anyway. So just remember that every time you sneer at Walmart, you’re sneering at the poor who keep them going out of necessity. And then go out and say, “I would never live in a country with rampant poverty and unemployment!”
I’m waiting.
Nova Terra 